The brutal House on the Hill

9 December 2003 — 11:00am

Parliament House in Canberra is one of the most destructive workplaces in Australia, writes Greg Barns.

That the combination of alcohol, stress and tiredness should have been the causes of Senator Andrew Bartlett's uncharacteristic conduct in Parliament last Thursday night points yet again to one thing: Canberra's Parliament House is one of the most destructive working environments in Australia.

When I worked there as chief of staff to then finance minister John Fahey from 1996 to 1999, I regularly saw a staff member of another senior minister in my corridor walk into his office with two bottles of wine under his arm, telling me: "I'm just settling in for the night."

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That staff member's minister was often drunk during the long evenings in that place.

Then there was the ritual - still alive, unfortunately - of MPs heading down to Canberra watering holes late at night to drink until the early hours of the morning. They get a few hours sleep and are back at their desks early the next day attempting to deal with issues of magnitude, while watching their backs and trying not to be paranoid about the Canberra press gallery.

I witnessed the brutality of Parliament House when Labor senator Nick Sherry attempted suicide in 1997 after allegations against him over travel rorts brought his mind and emotions unstuck.

And in the same year I suffered a mental health breakdown, was diagnosed with depression and spent too much time in the company of alcohol and anti-depressant drugs while my marriage collapsed around me.

The therapist I saw in Canberra said to me one afternoon in early 1998: "You won't get better until you leave the Hill", referring to Parliament House. He was right. I did leave 12 months later, but the damage to my mental health was done by that time. In fact, in the fortnight before I left, I lost control in a meeting with two other staff members from other ministerial offices. I pushed one of them out of my office door, and sat in my office shaking for an hour afterwards.

Parliament House is a brutal and unrelenting work environment. It warps people's judgement. Issues and information that bear little or no consequence to reality suddenly become important. The media, staff members and politicians feed off this poisonous atmosphere in a building that contains some fine art and architecture but no soul and no warmth.

To expect people to work 16-hour days day in and day out in such a place is unfair and downright cruel. And to expect them to do it in a city such as Canberra, where there are few support networks, little sense of community and no capacity to escape, means that the mental health of those who work in the House is put under such intense pressure that drugs, alcohol, sex and workaholism often come to be seen as the only means for survival.

In any private-sector organisation that cares about its employees today, the emphasis is on work-family balance, mental health support facilities, and rules about how many nights you can work back late. In other words, if the normal occupational health and safety rules applied to Parliament House, the place would be shut down as a dangerous working environment.

The game of politics as it is played in Australia is needlessly cruel and primitive. People's foibles, misjudgements and handicaps are not the subject of empathy or sympathy but of derision. I can vividly recall cruel jokes about Nick Sherry after his breakdown. It was said of me that I was mad and dangerous. Other people were accused of being alcoholics. A journalist rang me a few months ago to ask if Andrew Bartlett was drinking too much.

Perhaps most importantly, it is virtually impossible for MPs and staff members to find a shoulder to cry on, to talk frankly to someone else simply as one vulnerable human being to another. I was lucky I had the most wonderfully human boss, John Fahey. And his press secretary, David McLachlan, on quite a few occasions rescued me from the situation that Andrew Bartlett found himself in.

The community's sympathy should be with Andrew Bartlett, Nick Sherry, even Mark Latham who attacked a cab driver after a dinner in Sydney one night. These are all people working in an environment that takes no prisoners, that refuses to change its work hours to make them less stressful and, above all, that has no regard for the mental health of individuals who are often fragile but ambitious and narcissistic by disposition, in any event.

Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine once said that Parliament House, Canberra, has evil within it. He's right - it tests the sanity of its inhabitants, as Andrew Bartlett found out last Thursday. This latest incident should be a wake-up call to MPs that the way they work is, frankly, life-threatening.